Robotics & Automation Unimate through autonomous vehicles to foundation-model humanoids — the mechanisms, the pioneers, the deployment eras
A mind map of robotics and automation: the foundations in cybernetics and fixed automation; the industrial arm era; autonomy, perception, and behavior-based robotics; consumer and service robots; autonomous vehicles; and the contemporary wave of humanoids and foundation-model robotics. Named engineers, companies, platforms, and papers with dates across six branches.
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Foundations & Fixed Automation Industrial Arm Era Autonomy, Perception & Behavior Consumer & Service Robots Autonomous Vehicles Humanoids & Foundation-Model Robotics Cultural and conceptual origins Cybernetics and control Teleoperation Fixed and programmable automation Actuators and the physics of motion The Unimate decade Stanford Arm and PUMA Japanese rise European makers Kinematics and analysis Classical planning and symbolic AI Subsumption and behavior-based SLAM and state estimation Motion planning ROS and the open ecosystem iRobot and the Roomba Surgical robotics Warehouse automation Cobots and the low-cost wave Drones and aerial DARPA Challenges Google Self-Driving Car → Waymo Tesla Autopilot and FSD The AV ecosystem Sensing and stack architecture The humanoid lineage Boston Dynamics The 2023 humanoid renaissance Learning-based control Vision-Language-Action models Open problems and frontier Karel Čapek — R.U.R. coins "robot," 1921 Fritz Lang — Metropolis, 1927 (Maschinenmensch) Isaac Asimov — Three Laws of Robotics, Runaround, 1942 Asimov — I, Robot anthology, 1950 Norbert Wiener — Cybernetics, 1948 Grey Walter — Machina speculatrix (tortoises), Bristol 1948 Ross Ashby — Design for a Brain, 1952 Shannon's Theseus — maze-solving mouse, 1950 Kalman filter — Rudolf Kálmán, 1960 (linear state estimation) Raymond Goertz — master-slave manipulator, Argonne 1948 (undercredited) Electrically coupled teleoperators — nuclear-lab applications Predictive displays and bilateral teleoperation — pre-autonomy paradigm Jacquard loom — punch-card programmable, 1804 George Devol — Programmed Article Transfer patent, 1954 (granted 1961) NC machining — John Parsons / MIT, 1952 PLC — Modicon 084 by Dick Morley, 1968 Automation Magazine founded, 1954 DC motors — the 19th-century workhorse Harmonic drive — C.W. Musser, 1955 (compact, high-ratio) Servo control and position feedback Hydraulic vs. electric — the power-density tradeoff Pneumatic actuation — low cost, compliant, imprecise Devol + Joseph Engelberger found Unimation, 1956 Unimate installed at GM Trenton plant, 1961 (first industrial robot) Unimate 1900 series — die casting, welding, material handling 2,700 pound hydraulic manipulator Engelberger — "Father of Robotics" Victor Scheinman — Stanford Arm, 1969 (6-DOF all-electric) Scheinman — MIT Arm ("Silver Arm"), 1974 Scheinman founds Vicarm, 1973; sold to Unimation 1977 PUMA (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly), 1978 PUMA 560 — the workhorse research platform of the 1980s Waseda WABOT-1 — Ichiro Kato, 1973 (first anthropomorphic) SCARA (Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm) — Hiroshi Makino, 1978 Fanuc founded from Fujitsu, 1972 Yaskawa Motoman MH5 — 1977 Japan surpasses US in installed robots, early 1980s MITI Robotics subsidies and leasing programs KUKA — Germany, industrial robots from 1973 ABB Robotics (ASEA) — IRB 6 hydraulic arm, 1973 Stäubli — Swiss precision manipulators Comau — Italy, FIAT automation Denavit-Hartenberg parameters — DH convention, 1955 Forward and inverse kinematics formalisms Jacobian matrices and singularity analysis Screw theory — Ball 1900, revived by Roth and Hunt Khatib — operational space formulation, 1987 Shakey the Robot — SRI, 1966–1972 (first mobile AI robot) STRIPS planner — Fikes & Nilsson, SRI 1971 A* search — Hart, Nilsson, Raphael, SRI 1968 CART and Freddy II — Stanford and Edinburgh autonomous vehicles, 1970s Rodney Brooks — A Robust Layered Control System, MIT 1986 Subsumption architecture — layered finite-state machines Genghis — six-legged walking insect robot, MIT 1989 Brooks — Intelligence Without Reason, IJCAI 1991 Brooks' 1990 "Elephants Don't Play Chess" — the anti-representation manifesto Hugh Durrant-Whyte & Leonard — SLAM formulation, 1991 EKF-SLAM — extended Kalman filter approach FastSLAM — particle filter, Thrun et al. 2002 GraphSLAM — pose-graph optimization, Thrun & Montemerlo 2006 Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) — smartphone-grade pose LIDAR SLAM — Cartographer, LOAM, modern stacks Probabilistic Robotics textbook — Thrun, Burgard, Fox, 2005 Configuration space — Lozano-Pérez, MIT 1983 Potential fields — Khatib, 1986 RRT (Rapidly-exploring Random Trees) — Steven LaValle, 1998 RRT* — Karaman & Frazzoli, 2011 (asymptotically optimal) CHOMP — Ratliff, Zucker, Bagnell, Srinivasa, 2009 TrajOpt and ROS MoveIt Willow Garage founded — Scott Hassan, 2006 ROS (Robot Operating System) open-sourced, 2009 PR2 research platform — Willow Garage, 2010 ROS 2 — real-time, DDS-based, 2017 Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) founded, 2012 Gazebo simulator — multi-robot physics simulation iRobot founded — Rodney Brooks, Helen Greiner, Colin Angle, 1990 Roomba launched, Sep 2002 (~$200 consumer vacuum) 25M+ units sold by 2020 PackBot — military bomb-disposal robot, deployed Afghanistan 2002 iRobot acquired by Amazon (proposed 2022; unwound 2024) da Vinci Surgical System — Intuitive Surgical, FDA cleared 2000 SRI Green Telepresence — DARPA-funded, 1990s ROBODOC — orthopedic surgery, 1992 ~8,000 da Vinci systems deployed globally by 2024 Auris / Monarch platform for lung biopsy — acquired by J&J, 2019 Kiva Systems founded — Mick Mountz, 2003 Mobile pods under shelves — order-picking automation Amazon acquires Kiva for $775M, 2012 Amazon Robotics — 750K+ robots deployed by 2024 Locus Robotics, 6 River Systems, Fetch — ARM competitors Berkshire Grey, Symbotic — automated grocery DCs Universal Robots founded — Odense, Denmark, 2005 UR5 cobot launched, 2008 (~$30K, no safety cage) Rethink Robotics — Baxter, 2012 (shuttered 2018) Franka Emika Panda — German cobot, 2016 ISO 10218 and ISO/TS 15066 — cobot safety standards Teradyne acquires Universal Robots + MiR, 2015 DJI founded — Frank Wang, 2006 DJI Phantom, 2013 — consumer drone category Skydio — autonomous consumer drone, 2018 Anduril Ghost — defense drone, 2018 DJI dominates ~70% of consumer drone market by 2022 DARPA Grand Challenge, Mar 2004 — no vehicle completes Mojave course 2005 Grand Challenge — Stanley (Stanford) wins, $2M prize Sebastian Thrun leads Stanford team; Red Whittaker leads CMU DARPA Urban Challenge, 2007 — Boss (CMU) wins Robotics Challenge 2013–2015 — disaster response humanoids Google X self-driving project launches, 2009 (led by Thrun) Google Cars log 1M autonomous miles by 2015 John Krafcik joins as CEO, 2015 Waymo spun out as Alphabet subsidiary, Dec 2016 Waymo One public robotaxi service, Phoenix 2018 Waymo 150K+ weekly rides by 2024 across SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin Tesla Model S released, 2012 Autopilot 1.0 (Mobileye-based), Sep 2014 Autopilot 2.0 (Nvidia Drive PX2), Oct 2016 Hardware 3 (Tesla custom FSD chip), Apr 2019 FSD Beta rollout, 2020 FSD v12 end-to-end neural network, 2024 Vision-only approach after removing radar (2021) and ultrasonics (2022) Cruise Automation — acquired by GM for $1B, 2016 (closed 2024) Argo AI — Ford + VW backed, shut down 2022 Aurora Innovation — Chris Urmson, founded 2017 (trucking focus) Zoox — acquired by Amazon for $1.2B, 2020 Motional (Hyundai + Aptiv) — Las Vegas, Boston Baidu Apollo, Pony.ai, WeRide — China AV stack Mobileye — Intel subsidiary, ADAS supplier dominance LiDAR vs. vision debate — Velodyne 64-line HDL vs. Tesla camera-only Solid-state LiDAR — Luminar, Innoviz, Aeva, Ouster HD maps and localization — cm-accuracy prior maps Modular pipeline: perception → prediction → planning → control End-to-end learning (Tesla FSD v12, Wayve) — single policy SAE Levels 0–5 autonomy taxonomy Waseda WABOT-1 — first bipedal humanoid, 1973 WABIAN series — continued Waseda lineage Honda E0 → P2 → P3 → ASIMO, 1986–2000 ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility), 2000 Toyota Partner Robot (Trumpet Robot), 2005 NASA Robonaut 2 — deployed to ISS, 2011 Founded by Marc Raibert, spun out of MIT Leg Lab, 1992 BigDog quadruped — DARPA-funded, 2005 PETMAN humanoid, 2011 Atlas humanoid (electric), 2013 (hydraulic until 2024) Spot quadruped — commercial release, 2019 Acquired by Google 2013, SoftBank 2017, Hyundai 2020 Stretch — warehouse mobile manipulator, 2022 Atlas fully electric redesign, Apr 2024 Tesla Optimus — unveiled Aug 2021, Gen 2 Dec 2023 Figure AI — Brett Adcock, founded 2022; Figure 01, 2023; Figure 02, 2024 1X Technologies (formerly Halodi) — NEO humanoid, Norway Agility Robotics — Digit commercial deployment, Amazon 2023 Apptronik — Apollo, 2023; NASA partnership Sanctuary AI — Phoenix, Canada Unitree H1, G1 — Chinese low-cost humanoids, 2024 Boston Dynamics + TRI partnership on Atlas LLM integration, 2024 Deep RL for locomotion — NVIDIA Isaac Lab, sim-to-real Domain randomization — Tobin et al., OpenAI 2017 OpenAI Dactyl — Rubik's cube solving hand, 2019 Imitation learning — DAgger, Behavior Cloning Diffusion Policy — Chi et al., MIT/Columbia 2023 ALOHA — bimanual imitation platform, Stanford 2023 Locomotion via MPC + RL — ANYmal, Spot Google SayCan — language + affordance, 2022 Google RT-1 — Robotics Transformer, Dec 2022 RT-2 — Vision-Language-Action model, Jul 2023 Open X-Embodiment — 22-institution dataset, 2023 Octo — open-source generalist policy, 2024 OpenVLA — open-source VLA, Stanford + Toyota 2024 NVIDIA GROOT and Isaac platform — humanoid foundation models, 2024 Physical Intelligence (PI) — pi0 VLA, 2024 Dexterous manipulation still far from human hand performance Whole-body control for humanoids — dynamic loco-manipulation Sim-to-real gap for contact-rich tasks Data scarcity — collecting real-robot data is expensive Safety certification for humanoids in unstructured environments Actuator energy density — batteries vs. compute-per-watt tradeoff Soft robotics — octopus-inspired manipulation, Harvard and MIT labs Robotics & Automation Brian Tighe · Mind Maps Orbital mind map. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, or use the buttons above (+ / − / 0 keys also work). Hover a node to highlight its path to the center and the subtree beneath it. How to read this The center holds the topic. The six branches fan out bilaterally — three on each side — each in its own color. Sub-branches nest three levels deep under each top-level branch. Hover a leaf to trace the path back to the center; hover a branch to see everything it contains.
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